


Stages

by glassofwater



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Death, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, Dick Grayson-centric, Existential Crisis, Existentialism, Hurt Dick Grayson, Introspection, Other characters mentioned - Freeform, Past Character Death, Suicidal Thoughts, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25195150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glassofwater/pseuds/glassofwater
Summary: He's dying. No matter how he looks at it, he's dying.It's not fair.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Everyone
Comments: 4
Kudos: 153





	Stages

**Author's Note:**

  * For [succeeding](https://archiveofourown.org/users/succeeding/gifts).



> This work is for succeeding and their absolutely amazing series "Glass"- I highly reccommend you read it, it's so beautiful and it inspired me to write a small bit of a character study on the one and only Grayson.

Things don’t just stop. Except they do. 

He knows this. 

Knows this like he knows when his birthday is. It’s sometime around spring, he’s sure of it, but maybe not since they never found his birth certificate and his parents just celebrated his birth whenever they had the time to because they were always so busy traveling and performing, and at this point he knows his own first death date better than he knows his supposed age.

But, at the moment, it’s really hard for him to come to terms with the fact that things just cease. That things stop. That he doesn’t have any say in it when things stop. That it’s not up for him to decide when something should stop or start.

Because, what comes after? What happens after something stops?

Okay, he’s skirting around the topic. He’s trying not to panic. He’s trying really hard to compartmentalize and reevaluate and think and just try to wrap his head around the fact that  _ things just stop.  _

People die. Everyday. All the time.

He knows this like he knows that his parents died a horrible and brutal death. 

He knows this like he knows that Jason died a horrible and brutal death. 

He knows this like he knows that Jason came back to life but was different and angry and murderous. He knows this like how he thought he knew Bruce had died and it was his duty to become Batman in his place and take on a new Robin. He knows this like how he knows he died for a minute but was then brought back to life and forced into secrecy. He knows this like how he knows Damian died and he wasn’t there to stop it. He knows this like how he knows that Damian was also brought back to life and was currently breathing and somewhat happy and  _ alive. _

Okay, so maybe he doesn’t actually know a lot of things. He doesn’t know what it’s like for something to just  _ stop  _ because nothing ever really stops for him. Everything just pauses and then restarts like nothing happened. 

Nothing ever stops permanently. Death is supposed to be permanent, but he knows more people that have come back from the dead than he knows those who actually stayed dead.

It’s haunting and tragic and awful, but  _ nothing ever stops. _

So maybe that’s why it’s so hard for him to come to terms with that fact. That things do actually stop and cease, and hearts don’t beat sometimes and there’s nothing you can do about it.

He doesn’t want to stop. Doesn’t have any intention of stopping or letting anyone else stop for a long time. He checks in regularly, makes sure everyone is healthy and happy, and tries his damned hardest to make sure everyone is ready to go and keep moving. 

So now that he can’t, now that he’s not moving, now that everything is just  _ stopping  _ around him, Dick is trying really hard to come to terms with the fact that sometimes things just stop and there’s nothing you can do about it.

He wants to call somebody. Anybody. Just pick up the damn phone. His hands won’t move though and he’s pretty sure his phone is nowhere near him. He needs to talk to someone. Needs to hear a voice other than the one that won’t stop going off inside his head.

Fine, he’ll admit. He’s scared. Fucking terrified. 

And alone.

The sheets around him are stained. He’s pretty sure Alfred will have a fit when he finds them. The smell isn’t pleasant either; somewhere along the line in his fright, Dick’s pretty sure he wet himself. The awful mixture of blood and urine doesn’t help his thought process.

He’s thought about it before. Plenty of times in fact. He even got an answer once and he had hated it. Hated it more than he thought possible.

It’s unfair. There was just nothing. Nothing at all. No darkness, no light, no fiery inferno of deserving punishment, and no fluffy clouds with songs of peace and rest. 

He had died and there had been nothing. Nothing waiting for him.

His mother had been religious, more so than his father, but she’d never specified what religion she believed in. When asked, she would simply smile and say that she prayed to whomever listened and was fair. Dick carried that on for her. He didn’t pray in front of others, not because he was ashamed for believing in a higher and glorious power, but because it was something private. Something special.

It had been something.

So when he died and opened his eyes again a minute later and had recalled  _ nothing _ , he cried. Because that meant that everyone he had ever loved, his mother, his father, his best friends, his brothers and sisters, had nothing waiting for them when they died.

They just stopped. 

And that was it.

_ And that wasn’t fucking fair. _

Why was it so impossible to hope for something more in the next life? Why was it so naive and foolish to think that there might be something greater and more beautiful than what they had been given? Why didn’t the deserving get what they deserved?

There had been a time, a time after Jason had died and he had been buried into the ground, where Dick wondered,  _ why not?  _ Why not kill? Why not kill the wretched and the foul? Why not when the innocent and the youthful were killed instead?

He was close. So close to killing the Joker. The man had been cackling in what should’ve been his final moments, and all Dick could think was, 

_ Death is too good for you. _

Right then, Dick had prayed and hoped with all his might that Hell existed and that it would devour the Joker in its fire. It never happened though. To this day, the Joker rotted in and out of the Asylum. Alive.

Some part of him almost thinks that it’s a good thing places like Heaven and Hell don’t exist. Who decides who goes where? Who decides, who places, who puts, who pushes, who burns, who smiles, who does what and when and where?

Who is fair enough to decide something like that? Who could ever be just enough to be judge, jury, and executioner? 

Eternal damnation or eternal rest. All of it forever as a result of a temporary life. Temporary decisions. Temporary choices. Fate rested on something so insignificant and yet everyone strived to do their best in order to get into the good place. 

The place where everything was beautiful and forever and peaceful.

Dick isn’t ready to face the nothing that waits for him. He doesn’t think he’s ever been ready. When he was younger, fresh faced and lively, he mocked death and all of its repercussions. He was untouchable. Nothing was permanent anyway, so why be scared of it at all? He’s not sure he ever feared the “other side”.

Ready to die for a cause. Ready to die for his friends. Ready to die for his city. Ready to die for his family. Ready to die for a stranger.

Why?

Why was he so ready for something like that?

Batman’s number one rule has always been  _ be prepared, _ and yet.

And yet.

He’s never felt so unprepared. So unready.

There are so many things he wants to do. He wants to get married, own a house, settle down, have kids, watch them grow up, kiss them on their cheeks and love them for as long as he can. 

He wants to see Damian, his first kid, grow up and become an adult and have a family of his own. He wants Bruce to be happy and satisfied, to see Batman hang up the cowl permanently and breathe peacefully. He wants to see Jason calm and in love with the world again, be in love with the idea of living and being a part of their lives. He wants to watch Tim realize that he is in control of his own life and that he can do whatever he pleases without anyone judging and pulling him back. He wants to see Cass and Steph finally be free of their burdens and griefs, shed their pasts that cling to them like shadows. He wants Duke to realize how important he is to the rest of them, wants him to know how loved and accepted he already is. He wants Barbra, his first love, his best friend, to understand how amazing she is and how wonderful everything she does is.

He wants so many things. So many. Is he greedy for that? Selfish for wanting so much? Shouldn’t he be grateful for all that he’s been given in this life? He’s been given so much and yet he wants more.

He needs more.

Dick Grayson isn’t ready to die. He’s not. 

He’s lived so long, but he hasn’t. Perpetually in a state of dying and decay, too slow for the results to surface in any way that matters. He’s been to more funerals than he has weddings and anniversaries. He’s bought more flowers to lay on a fresh grave than he has given to someone he loves. He’s probably hugged more dying people than he has those that are breathing.

And he regrets so much. Regrets so many things and so many “sorrys” he didn’t say. Regrets all the “I love yous” he was too chicken to say aloud. Regrets the words that did come out of his mouth in fits of rage and anger and unintentional tears. He hates to think about all the pain he’s caused his family, his friends, Gotham itself, and sometimes even regrets dawning the name Nightwing.

It all comes full circle and Dick thinks he does and he doesn’t regret living. 

He’s seen too much and has seen so little. He’s experienced all the wrong and right things. 

The turmoil inside of him that’s been building ever since that night at the circus, his first home, never found a way to release. It’s shoved away into a pit in the dark corners of his mind, and he likes it there. He likes it away and out of sight from everyone else because he doesn’t like to look at it. 

Who would?

He’s not ready. He needs more time.

_ Please, God, whoever is listening, please, I need more time. Just give me more time. _

And maybe this is all retribution for everything he’s ever done in his life. A horrible and twisted payback for all the lives he’s ruined, all the people he’s hurt, all the situations he could’ve prevented and changed. It’s the check after a lengthy meal at an expensive restaurant, and he’s finally realizing he doesn’t have the funds to pay for it. He’s looking around at the once full table, taking in the sight of half eaten dishes and still full glasses, and realizing that it wasn’t worth it.

The price is too high, and yet he ate and devoured and consumed and took all he wanted without a care in the world.

That dumb saying, the saying he’s never understood, rings in his head, and he can remember Bruce saying it to him on more than one occasion and he thinks he gets it now. He thinks he gets it.

You cannot have your cake and eat it too.

You cannot have a great life and still want to bargain with what you’re given. You cannot wish for a better ending, a better start, and have a better life too. You cannot hope and dream and pray and still want something more.

Life dishes out only one slice of cake per person, and it is utterly selfish to want more than that. You get what you are served, and the deserving get what they deserved.

But they don’t, _ they don’t _ , and it’s not fair.

Nothing is waiting. Nothing is on the other side. There is no divine intervention or demonic hellfire. There is emptiness, oblivion, and it is neither good nor bad. It just is. A blank void of nothingness that somehow still manages to take and take, and maybe that’s what he is for wanting and expecting more.

Maybe Dick Grayson is this empty void, unable to be filled, no matter how many things or people he stuffs himself full of. He can fool himself into believing that these relationships and bonds and friendships he flings himself into will make him whole and complete and make the ending that much sweeter, but in the end, he’s the only one listening to the joke.

He is the only one listening, and yet he still doesn’t get the punchline.

He still ends alone.

And it still troubles him and confuses him because  _ there has to be more.  _ There  _ has  _ to be, because if there isn’t, what was this all for? What was all the pain and sacrifice for? What was all the death and the tears and the grief for? 

For nothing?

He’d been given a task and he’d done it to the best of his abilities, and  _ goddamnit,  _ he needs more time. He needs more time to complete the madness. If there was nothing waiting for him, no family members or friends or promises of peace from the chaos that constantly surrounds him, then damn it all, he’d be willing to put up with the chaos for another thousand years. 

He just needed more time.

_ Please, give me more time. _

Dick isn’t sure how long it’s been. How long he has laid here and thought and bled and died. It feels like a very long time. Not quite an eternity, no, no, he’ll never get to experience that, but something close to it. Something nearing the cusp of eternal and infinite and forever.

Perhaps this is  _ his  _ forever. This is  _ his  _ infinite life. He doesn’t remember it starting, and right now, it has not ended. His life has been limitless because there has not yet been a limit for him to overstep. To reach across. To end. 

Yes, it’s true, right now he is ending. Right now he is reaching the limit. 

But, he has not reached it yet. It is still a bit further away, so for now. For now, he shall remain infinite. Eternal. Limitless. Yes, for now, he’ll be immortal.

Immortal things don’t stop. They go on and on and on, and there is never any rest because if they rest, they stop. Even if it’s just for a moment, a very brief pause, it is still a stop and they cease to be immortal. They cease. They stop. He does not want to stop.

The breath he drags in through his lungs rattles, like old wind chimes that creak and moan in the wind. If he were to open his eyes, he knows he’d still find himself in the same dark room, surrounded by old haunts and comforts. So close to the ones he loves and yet so very far away. 

How bored the universe must be to toy with him so cruelly. Perhaps he thinks himself altogether too grand to think that the universe would toy with  _ him _ , someone as ill important as he, but it feels like that. He will allow himself to feel toyed with by the universe. He will allow himself to feel that important for now.

When he exhales, Dick realizes, with almost glass like clarity, that he is going to miss them all so much. Unbearably so. The thought slams against him like a surging wave, and the tears that begin to build up, hot and aflame in his eyes, rush out with equal force.

He’s going to miss them.

Dick isn’t sure why that shakes him. Why that singular thought sends his weakening heart into such a fray. Why? Why does that disturb him so greatly?

The answer comes just as quickly as the question does, and Dick struggles to be calm. To reset himself and give himself more time. He needs more time. 

For God’s sake,  _ he’s going to miss them all so much and he’s almost out of the time he so selfishly wants more of. _

They are his everything. His world. His reason for existing. His life. They are  _ his  _ and if he stops. If he stops.

He will lose them. He will miss them and they will forever be lost. 

Eternally lost.

And that sounds hopelessly sad, a depressing fate to be lost for all time. To let the winds of change and chance swipe away all traces of their existence. Dick tries to reason with himself. That’s not right, no, they won’t be forgotten just because he will. Just because he stops doesn’t mean everything else does too.

Right? Right? It has to be true. It has to be right. But he won’t  _ know  _ that, he won’t  _ know  _ if it’s true or right or good or not. He’ll be gone. He will have stopped.

He will be dead.

Dying is nothing new. It’s a normal part of the cycle. When he was younger, during a time where everything was so dark and hard and unforgiving, he may have even wished it would hurry up. That one day, it would take him and be so sudden and quick he wouldn’t have even known what hit him.

He may have even fantasized about what peoples’ reactions would be when he died; if they would wail and cry at his grave or if they would curse him and hope he stayed dead. In his wildest imagination, in the smallest corners of his mind, he hoped that his death would be the thing to push  _ The Batman  _ over the edge. That it would wreck him so badly, that Batman, the great and stoic and all knowing Batman, would beg and cry for him to come back and breathe once again. 

That the first Robin’s death would  _ mean  _ something detrimental to Batman’s sanity.

That insane and evil little corner of his mind, the part of himself he tried so hard to ignore and pretend it didn’t exist, made him almost gleeful with these thoughts. That maybe one day  _ he,  _ Dick Grayson, the first Robin, Nightwing, would be the weight to tip the scales in the Dark Knights perfectly balanced world. This disgusting hope that he mattered that much to Batman, to Bruce, to his second father, kept him awake some nights and made him almost cry for how cruel he was.

He’s known it since he was a child that he was a cruel and selfish creature. That the comfort and contact he seeks out is just some strange form of validation. That if they touch him, if they look at him, if they accept his little act and display, that they will all love him and he will be  _ real  _ and breathing and that that night at Haly’s, where he watched his parents crumple into the ground, hadn’t taken him with them. 

That this all wasn’t some strange dream he had conjured up. That everything around him, the capes, the long nights, the metas and god like people, Gotham itself, was all real. That  _ he  _ was real.

That he was alive.

Even now, with the numbness setting in, the blood soaked sheets, the acrid stench of his own bodily fluids, the small noises he can hear of the Manor just beyond the closed door, he isn’t sure if any of it is real. If he’s real. If he exists. 

Perhaps that night, where everything just seemed to happen and go so slowly, he had fallen with his parents too. He had taken flight and all was well for a few brief seconds before cords were snapping and they were all suddenly plummeting. And now he was here, stuck in whatever place he was in.

Limbo. Purgatory. The Middle. Oblivion. Nonexistence.

Even with the thought that none of it is real and he’s already dead, Dick can’t get over it. He’s going to miss them. He didn’t even get to say goodbye. He didn’t get to.

_ Let me have this _ , he thinks, and he’s not even sure who he is speaking to or if he’s even thinking at all. If he’s alive enough to be allowed to have a mind.  _ Let me have this. Let me say goodbye. Give me enough time. _

There’s a clock that sits directly in front of where he lays, mounted on the wall like some trophy. He can hear it, but he can’t see it, and as it ticks and ticks and ticks, he wonders what it’s counting down for. What it moves and ticks for. Why it tells time when it cannot even tell how much time has passed itself.

It’s a funny thing to personify something like a clock, to try and make sense and put it into human concepts as if time is something logical and not at all made up. As if the human mind could actually understand something as wide and infinite and magnificent as time itself. It gets broken down to the picosecond, expanded to supereons, and then it all gravitates back to the beginning of time or where it’s supposed to have started.

A big bang. Big enough to create universes, solar systems, planets, nebulas, bright red stars, and even time. Time started with a big bang and it’s supposed to stop that way too. Time is supposed to stop. 

Strange, isn’t it? Something as grand and forever as  _ time  _ is supposed to stop. Something as immortal and eternal and old as time is supposed to just stop one day. Collapse in on itself and become some void that sucks everything back in and stops everything else as well.

Does that make time brief? The entirety of time itself, the amalgamation of years and seconds and planets and big bangs. Does that make it mortal and temporary? Does that make time human? Something as alien and non-human like time, being that it will stop but for now is infinite and limitless; does that make time like him?

He’s not bold enough to say it aloud, but there is comfort in knowing that he might be right.

He counts with the clock, ticking in time with it, and maybe it’s coincidence or maybe it’s the cosmic forces of the universe granting him a shred of pity, but when he gets to 42, someone knocks.

Once, twice, three times.

Someone knocks on the door.

“Dick? Can I come in?”

_ Thank you. _

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Do let me know what you thought, it would make my day!
> 
> (if you squinted closely enough, you may have noticed that this was following the five stages of grief, hence the title)


End file.
